Gabriel returned from Southampton on the Friday night and there was an almost immediate row, Nicholas having volunteered Gabriel to go around to Randolph’s house (halfway across London in Holland Park) to help out first thing in the morning, Gabriel furious that he had not at least been consulted before getting to the real point of his anger: that Nicholas was now disappearing for weeks on end without bothering to tell their mother where he was going.
Her mother, meanwhile, continued to whisper about “returning” and—unbelievably—taking Isabella’s father’s side against her brother.
And for the first time, with the fresh eyes of the returning student, Isabella began to consider her parents’ relationship for what it truly was—fractured, incoherent, erratic; mutually critical, disdainful, dismissive, emotionally terse, emotionally illiterate. And yet, she observed, there was a bilateral understanding, which, though never explicit or remarked upon, was near absolute—lived out in a series of elaborate codes and oblique conversational procedures. In fact, she now realized, her mother was always pretending to her father’s view, as soon as he showed up, though all parties knew her avowals to be utterly false.
In the car on the way to the service, for example, Isabella’s secret was detonated out of the blue and her mother suddenly pronounced: “Izzy, don’t expect us to support you, if you intend to live at home.” (The sheer distancing cruelty of that “intend.”) Then, next minute, her father was blithely affecting the opposite—considerate, thoughtful, compassionate: “Is, this is the great opportunity of your life. You need to think very carefully about what you are doing.” When in fact Isabella knew full well—they all knew full well—that her mum did not care one kopek about money and would have supported her forever, until the last drop of her working blood, and that of course her father did not care one idle flick of his contemptuous wrist about Cambridge as a “great opportunity” or otherwise, having been there himself, to the very same college, and having declared on several painfully public occasions, including the day that she had got her offer of a place to study modern languages, that the university was a convenient depository for “the most boring people in the country—a mini-Australia for the criminally tedious.”
On the Sunday, the day after the funeral, when they were all four alone, the ratchet wound itself up another notch. Isabella could hardly believe that they were going to attempt to dine together as a family, but this indeed was the stated plan for the afternoon. “Lay the table, Is, we’ll be back in an hour”—delivered with total Pravda-like conviction as her mother put on the green raincoat that she wore four seasons around and made for the heath with a silent Gabriel… leaving Isabella and her father alone together in the large room at the front of the house, Isabella in the tatty chair by the empty grate, Nicholas standing by the window, watching out for she knew not what.
It was one of those days when no matter where she sat or how many layers she put on, Isabella found that she simply could not warm her bones. The whole house was cold. (Her mother was pretending that the heating was necessarily rationed via the timer and had in fact been on all morning, her father that it was broken. Both were lying—someone had simply switched it off.) There was also something wrong with the workings inside the grandfather clock, so that each movement of the minute hand was accompanied by a just-audible scrape. She was downstairs only because she was awaiting the imminent arrival of her boyfriend, Callum, whom she had told to come over and pick her up, with the idea that they might go down into Camden and see one of his rival Brit-pop band’s gigs, and whom she did not want intercepted by her father. Though going out, she knew, would aggravate mother, father, and brother alike. Or maybe nobody would care at all.
She was pretending to look through the neat file of official-seeming documents left behind on the small table by Walter Earnshaw, solicitor and new best friend of her father’s. Somehow or other her father had arranged for everything to be transferred to him; she was dimly aware that she and Gabriel should be studying things more carefully, but leaving aside their utter naivete and hopeless lack of resources, it seemed ridiculous to check up on her own father. In any case, her real attention was swooping, perching, and beating its wings elsewhere—far, wide, near and back again. After another minute she abandoned the charade and addressed her father’s back, thinking that this was at least some kind of an opportunity to communicate to him the sincerity of her mother’s hopes.
“Dad, you know… you know, you should get Mum a place in Petersburg. I bet you can buy stuff there now.”
He did not turn around.
“It’d be a great investment. Everything is opening up again.” This wasn’t true, or if it was, Isabella had no way of knowing it to be so. But she said it to appear insider-informed in front of her father. And to provoke him. The word “investment,” she hoped, would do that.
“We have our own priorities,” he said to the windows.
“Mum has been talking about it nonstop since I got back. Honestly, you should see her—she’s glued to the news, and every time there’s a picture of Petersburg she starts pointing at the TV. She really, really wants to go back—even if it’s only for a while. You know she does. She was planning a trip with me in any case. We could search for flats. She would love to be able to go there a few months every year.” Not looking up, she added, “Now you have all that money, you probably won’t even notice some of it gone.”
That did it.
Her father turned. “Oh, don’t worry, Isabella, as soon as I die, you—”
“You know that’s not what I am talking about.”
“You can all go and hang around Leningrad as much as you like.” He fixed her with his eyes. “Why exactly have you left Cambridge? And please don’t tell me that it’s got anything to do with that bloody boy. What is his name?”
They were speaking to each other directly now.
“Jesus.” Isabella was conscious of a heat rash on her chest. All her life she had been caught between these two sufferings: the one—trying to goad her father into engaging with her, and the other—her hurt at his cruelty when he finally did so. “I don’t care about the money, Dad. I’m just saying that you should buy Mum somewhere to live—or rent something. And why not back in Russia? We can sell Grandpa’s house and buy a small flat. She hates this place. It… it’s cold and it’s empty. And I know you are away more or less all the time—fair enough—and she needs some new thing, you know—something she cares about in her life. Just imagine: she’s not been back since she was… well… well, since she left with you. She’d love to see Petersburg again. She’d love to stay there. I really think—”
“Isabella, I want to be clear about this.” Seemingly insensible of the cold, he stepped forward, his shirt, as ever, without a single crease. “We’re not paying for you to hang around here. If you’re at Cambridge, that’s a different matter. We’ve always said that we’re prepared to support you until you finish university. But that’s it. After that you are on your own. So if you are serious about leaving, then don’t think that you can waste the next three years finding yourself here.”
“What the hell makes you think I want to live here?”
“I have no idea what your plans are—that is your business. You can live where you please, of course. Here included.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
“But if you are not going to complete your degree and if you do expect to live here, then I will expect you to pay maintenance to your mother. You can’t just swan around the world as you please. You’re an adult now.”